| |
 |
“
|
Aston Dane
designed and supplied the control systems in an upgrade to a more
flexible, multi-product manufacturing facility, to a demanding
timescale.
|
” |
|
In September of 1998 ChiRex had
orders to supply various pharmaceutical products, however their Annan
facility was inflexible and difficult to support . They needed to
upgrade the plant to provide a more flexible ,
multi-product-manufacturing facility to accommodate new products and
enable them to be successful in this competitive market. The
design and supply of the control system was required to be completed
in only 8 months if Chirex were to successfully fulfil their orders.
The project team achieved this demanding time-scale and the systems
have since been further enhanced by the addition of recipes for a
number of new products.
Aston Dane plc
is now working
on a second plant at the Annan site providing a similar system to an
equally demanding specification and time-scale.
Chirex plant operation was conducted from a remote
building using computer technicians. The operators monitored
plant condition and via two-way radios reported back to the
technicians monitoring the system. Chirex wanted to transfer the
control to the manufacturing area and establish a more general-purpose
facility to manufacture multiple products. According to Chirex Project
Manager Roy McGregor, "We spent considerable time and effort
working with a consultant to define what we needed and to evaluate the
market for the best fit.
RS Batch
Our site knowledge was Allen-Bradley PLCs so the next logical step
was to use RSBatch plus its associated products to provide us a mainly
single source solution." Chirex commissioned four different
processes in addition to a solvent recovery system. Aston Dane,
supported by consulting services from Sequencia, developed the
engineering design and software implementation. The benefits received
so far include direct plant monitoring/ control of the process,
manufacturing involving process chemists in the design and,
eliminating process control as a critical path item for plant
turnarounds between products.
The system supplied by Aston Dane consisted of two redundant
batch-servers controlling different plant areas. The local control
units were Allen Bradley PLC5 PLC’s and operator interface was
provided by five Rockwell RSView workstations situated on the plant
within the hazardous area zones. Reporting and engineering facilities
were provided by additional workstations located in an operational
control room suite. Aston Dane supplied, installed and commissioned
the complete control system, including fibre optic networks, computer
hardware, application software, system software, configuration and
control panels.
Chirex Inc.
Chirex Inc. serves the outstanding needs of some of the largest
pharmaceutical and life science companies in the world, providing
contract process research and development, pharmaceutical fine
chemical manufacturing services and by offering its customers access
to the Company’s extensive portfolio of proprietary technologies. The
company’s contract manufacturing services developed over the past
thirty years, include process research and development, hazard
evaluation, analytical methods development, clinical quantity
production and pilot-scale and commercial-scale manufacturing at its
world class, Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP) facilities in Annan
Scotland and Dudley England. The Company’s customers include Glaxo
Wellcome plc, Smith Kline Beecham plc. Sanofi S.A., Pfizer Inc.,
Pharmacia & Upjohn Inc., Eli Lilly and Co. |
|
